This was a very clever card at the time. The IVC (Intelligent Video
Controller) had only a mono display, but the resolution was variable. It
made an excellent display card as it could emulate the standard Nascom
display and also display graphics. The cost was also reasonable (as
these things went at the time!) so it proved to be very popular. It was well named, as it included its own Z80A processor, 2kB RAM, CRTC chip and operating system in EPROM. This made it independent of the main Z80. Only 1kB of the RAM was actually used, the remainder could run user programs.

An unusual addition was a parallel keyboard input. (Gemini GM821 Cherry 59-key or GM827 Rotec 87-key). The latter had user-definable keys. It was thus possible to build quite a nice system using just this card with a G811 CPU/Bytewide ROM/RAM card or G813 CPU/64k RAM card!

Dedicated Z80A processor

6845 graphics control processor

80 characters 25 line mono main display

Second width-programmable mono display (supplied as 48×25)

Inverse display possible

128 Programmable character generator

128 Fixed characters in ROM

160×75 “pixel” graphics

Keyboard input (with user-definable keys)

Combined video output (not via an RF modulator)

This card was designed to run without using the main computer’s memory. A system of commands was sent to the board via three I/O ports. Because of this, existing software using the NASCOM memory-mapped display would not work.

An unusual choice of connector was used for the video output. If you
look at the top of the card in the picture you can see a standard 1/4 inch “jack” plug – not normally associated with video signals!